EDITORIAL: Obama for a second term

WHEN President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, the nation faced three major crises -- the long-running, costly and bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an economy close to seizing up.

We are no longer fighting in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan is, for better or worse, hurtling toward a withdrawal deadline on which Obama insisted, and the economy is limping toward recovery with 30 straight months of job growth, slow though it has been.

To paraphrase Meatloaf, two and a half out of three ain't bad.

It is true the economy has inched, stumbled and dallied its way toward recovery. But how much of that is the incumbent's fault is an open question.

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The economy handed to Obama was one ungodly mess, caused by millions of individual home mortgages sliced and diced among a bewildering array of interlocking financial instruments contrived by Wall Street.

Obama's economic stimulus bill did not return the economy to the status quo ante recession, but it did keep the gears of the economy moving through a perilous passage. The stimulus worked as well as it could have given the illiquid nature of the collapsed pile of mortgage instruments, which simply were going to take time to unravel.

IN other policy areas, Obama has achieved a mixed record against Republican intransigence.

On the plus side, he achieved health care reform, lifted the increasingly anachronistic "don't ask-don't tell" policy in the military, rescued the auto industry and its good-paying jobs, took a cautious but decisive role in freeing Libya of Gaddafi, kept us out of the Syrian civil war, tightened the international noose on the Iranian nuclear program, and made the gutsy call that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Despite being a public relations failure, the Affordable Care Act is a considerable policy achievement. It represents a solid, if imperfect, step forward toward extending health care to all Americans.

On the negative side, Obama has failed to close the budget deficit, reform immigration, make substantial progress to attack man made climate change, or impose meaningful regulation of the casino culture of Wall Street, where the house always wins and everyone else always loses.

AS for Republican challenger Mitt Romney, who knows?

There are so many Mitts, it's impossible to know just who, exactly, would end up occupying the Oval Office if he were to be elected.

He was for abortion rights, as governor, before he was against them, as presidential candidate.

He was for gay rights, as governor, before he was against them, as presidential candidate.

Hell, he was the architect of health care coverage by individual mandate in Massachusetts before he railed against it as "Obamacare."

Nothing so well illustrates the malleable nature of the Romney candidacy as the inscrutable mathematics of his taxation and budget plan. He insists that a nation with a huge budget deficit needs across-the board tax cuts, but declines to explain how he would balance the revenue loss with spending or tax deductions.

The truth is that the math is impossible. Balancing the budget will require spending restraint, including entitlements, and broadly applied tax increases, which must include the middle class.

AND, then, there is the unguarded Mitt.

There's nothing quite like hearing what someone really thinks of you when he thinks you're not listening. In a chummy room of fat-cat donors, Romney famously said that 47 percent of Americans see themselves as victims who refuse to "take personal responsibility ... for their lives."

Those are the words of someone we scarcely would want to see sitting on a town board, much less in the highest executive office in the land.

In a turbulent era, Obama has given the nation a steady hand in its affairs, foreign and domestic. Obama hasn't been all that we'd hoped, but he deserves re-election.